A whistleblower unveils exclusive allegations about Lutnick and Epstein’s business ties.

In an exclusive investigation, a whistleblower has told the BBC how he unearthed evidence suggesting that US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick failed to disclose a business relationship with the paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein.

Simon Andriesz was a trader at one of Lutnick’s Wall Street firms, but it wasn’t until the Epstein files were released earlier this year that he says he confirmed a longstanding suspicion that his boss was misrepresenting his relationship with Epstein.

BBC financial investigations correspondent Andy Verity joins us to unpack the new investigation.

Background:
This air cleaner is a homemade system that is useful for lowering the levels of respiratory aerosol particles

A letter calls for policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential disruptions from artificial intelligence.

A letter calls for policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential disruptions from artificial intelligence.

Overview

Prof. Kate Adamala and her team at the University of Minnesota have built SpudCell, a cell-like system constructed entirely from known chemical components that can perform a complete cell cycle.

The system contains 36 purified enzymes, a 90,000 base pair genome spread across nine separate DNA molecules, and a lipid membrane. SpudCell is able to grow, replicate its genome, divide, and undergo selection and competition across multiple generations.

Unlike earlier work on minimal cells that carved down living cells, SpudCell is built entirely bottom-up from individually purified, non-living components. It is the first time such a system has demonstrated a complete cell cycle.

Thank Goodness finally an easy way to check

With the publication today of five deeply researched and peer-reviewed papers, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and dozens of collaborating physicists have cemented our confidence in the core plasma physics assumptions at work within our upcoming ARC fusion power plant.

The scientifically rigorous papers, with 58 co-authors, span 226 pages in a special edition of the the Journal of Plasma Physics. They detail how an ARC plant will produce roughly 1.1 gigawatts (GW) of fusion power that we’ll convert into 400 megawatts (MW) of net electricity delivered continuously to the grid — enough to power about 280,000 average American homes.

[...]

1. Overview of the physics basis for the ARC fusion power plant
2. Power and particle exhaust for the ARC fusion power plant
3. ARC disruption physics and strategy
4. Performance and transport in the ARC tokamak
5. ARC physics basis — magnetohydrodynamics

Anti-voter law was among the most restrictive in the United States, and placed unconstitutional burdens on voters

CONCORD, N.H. - Last night, the federal court in New Hampshire struck down the state’s anti-voter law enacted in 2024, declaring it unconstitutional. The law, known as HB 1569, created some of the strictest registration requirements in the nation and, among other things, required documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration.

[...]

According to the Court’s decision, the law "constitutes an unjustifiable burden on the right to vote in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments,” “does little, if anything, to further the state’s interests,” and also “violates voters’ rights to procedural due process.”
[...] HB 1569 required documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration — documents like a passport or birth certificate, which many people do not have or cannot easily access — making it materially harder, if not impossible, for thousands of New Hampshire citizens to exercise their right to vote.

The Court’s decision is in line with other federal courts that have weighed in on this issue previously. For instance, federal courts struck down a similar Kansas law, which imposed a proof of citizenship requirement for state and federal elections, as violating both the U.S. Constitution and National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

https://www.aclu-nh.org/app/uploads/2026/05/05.28.26-Decision.pdf

By Craig Spencer

Dr. Spencer is an emergency doctor and a professor at Brown. He contracted Ebola in 2014 after treating patients in Guinea.

As soon as I heard about the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I knew it was going to be catastrophic.

On Friday, the D.R.C. reported 246 suspected cases. Most Ebola outbreaks end before they get that big. The same day, reports emerged that someone had died of Ebola hundreds of miles away in Kampala, Uganda’s most populous city. Less than a week after it was first declared, this is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak in history.

I’ve seen Ebola up close. I got it while treating patients in West Africa in 2014. I know how destructive the disease can be — and how unprepared we are for its return.

After the 2014 outbreak, which killed over 11,000 people, the world strengthened systems to catch and contain Ebola outbreaks early. Much of that infrastructure — surveillance networks, rapid response teams and diplomatic partnerships — has been dismantled over the past year, as the United States abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.

[...]

If the outbreak were caused by the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, we’d now be able to provide a recently developed vaccine to family members of infected patients and to health care workers. But we have no effective treatments or vaccines for the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola driving the current outbreak.

We’ll need to rely on bread-and-butter outbreak response measures, like contact tracing, isolation and community support. These are hard to carry out under ideal conditions. And the eastern part of Congo, where this outbreak is concentrated, is anything but ideal. Armed conflict has forced millions from their homes and left many health facilities damaged or destroyed. An Ebola outbreak in the region in 2018 took nearly two years to contain.

This time around, we have far less capacity to respond. In the first weeks of the second Trump administration, Elon Musk gleefully boasted about feeding the United States Agency for International Development into a “wood chipper.” The dismantling of U.S. foreign aid left clinics, community health workers and humanitarian organizations that formed the backbone of health care across eastern Congo without crucial funding.